Yes, We Have No Bananas

I've always eaten lots of bananas.  Call it an atativistic sentimentality about our simian ancestors, call it what you will, but I like bananas.  Loaded with potassium, which is essential for muscle contraction.  I just ate one, a diminutive yellow number with a somewhat tasteless core.  Not much like the bananas of my youth, which were big yellow jobs with creamy, sweet centers.  Made the whole lunch bag smell like banana.

Those bananas were of the Gros Michel ("Big Mike") variety.  Big Mike's gone now, felled by fusarium oxysporum or Panama Disease, a fungal infection which attacks the banana tree's roots and starves it of water.  There is no cure and it spreads like wildfire.  The big plantantion growers, like the United Fruit Co., substituted the Cavendish variety for Big Mike, and it's a Cavendish I just ate.  Smaller, not as sweet, derived from a Vietnamese strain.  Panama Disease has now hit the Cavendish and it's only a matter of time before it too goes extinct.  There is no successor in waiting.  We have to come up with something because bananas are just too important.  For example, when Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected president of Guatemala, hit on the idea in the early 1950s that Guatemalan peasants ought to own some of Guatemala's land, Eisenhower went along with Allen Dulles's idea (head of the CIA and also on the board of directors of United Fruit Co.) that Jacobo had to go. Arbenz was clearly a Commie sympathizer; what could be more Commie than the idea that poor people ought to own land? So the United Fruit Co., with the assistance of the CIA, overthrew Arbenz and installed a more banana-friendly dictator, thus giving rise to the term "Banana Republic."  I wonder if the company selling all those khaki pants and oversized cotton shirts ever reflects on the origin of the name?  Probably not - this is America!

I'm concerned that as America itself sinks into the economic status of a banana republic that we won't have any bananas to eat.  There are areas of the United States where we can grow okay bananas, like Florida and the Gulf Coast, but it's just a matter of time before Panama Disease shows up.  Naturally, big growers favor monocultured bananas (which is how we got into this problem in the first place), so they're looking for ways to modify the Cavendish genetically so it can resist fusarium, such as splicing in some fish genes or something. What if the bananas then get ich?  (That's a joke for tropical fish people.)  Or what if for some strange reason bananas start tasting good with a wedge of lemon and tartar sauce?  So much for the lunch bag memories.

I watched Barack yesterday give his "economic" speech.  To call his various nostrums "generalized" is probably too specific a word.  I wonder if he's having second thoughts.  Maybe this would have been the year for Hillary to become President.  The general plan of reducing interest rates to zero and pumping vast amounts of government money into the economy has already been tried, in Japan beginning in the early 1990's.  Fellow citizens of the American Banana Republic (Mackerel variety), I ask you: in all humility, and allowing for a perhaps understandable tendency toward feelings of Exceptionalism, between the two cultures, Japan & the U.S., which would you say is the harder working, better educated and more technologically advanced?  So would I.  Nevertheless, Japan has been in a deflationary slump since about 1991.  The problem was brought on by a real estate bubble, bank insolvencies and a credit freeze due to distrust among lending institutions.  Let me know if any of that sounds familiar.  Also, its manufacturing base had gotten hollowed out because of Asian competition where the cost of living was much lower.

Barack's general plan is reminiscent of a man standing on a ladder a few feet shy of the roof attempting to reach the roof by lifting the ladder on which he's standing.  (I know, I used that before, but doesn't it just get it?)  There's a Catch, and it's Catch-22, which says that the United States can borrow the money it needs to get the economy moving if the economy is moving so that Americans can buy stuff from countries like China who need our money in order to lend it back to us; but if the economy is not moving, then we can't buy stuff to give our money to China so they can give it back to us so we can get the economy moving.

That's some Catch, whistled Yossarian.  Indeed.  So perhaps, as the esteemed Nouriel Roubini prognosticates, the recession will end somewhere around mid-2010, meaning the economy will stop moving backwards.  At that point about 40% of the net worth of the United States will have been lost, and we will come into equilibrium.  But that's it.  We're there, just where Japan has been.  It's essential to recognize that the Congressional Clown Troupe is doing this Final Act, the one where they stack up four chairs on top of a unicycle and Bozo does a handstand on the top chair while holding three pool cues topped with spinning plates, not because they necessarily believe this can possibly work. They're doing it because Congress must always appear to be doing something.  Barack can't come out and say, hey, we just took a 40% hit.  Better learn to deal with it.  How do you start your Presidency with that?  And then follow it up by telling us the really bad news:  no bananas for you.

White House for Sale

I don't really know if there's an individual American citizen eliglible for the office of President who is actually capable, from the standpoint of education, experience and personal attributes, of leading the nation out of the economic morass into which it has sunk.  The big problem for Barack Obama is the two four-year terms of George W. Bush may have been way too much for the country to survive.  I realize that there are those Bush apologists who will insist, along with Bush himself, that the President was simply an innocent bystander with respect to the various disasters that occurred during his tenure.  For example, Ann Coulter recently attacked those who attack Bush for suggesting that the famous August 2001 PDB actually warned Bush that "Bin Laden was determined to attack within the U.S.," the way the PDB is titled. The leggy political satirist, blond hair flying, argued on her website that the PDB was the sort of thing a grade schooler would pull together from Google cites in a last minute effort to meet a term paper deadline.  

I mentioned recently that conservatives often do a better job of researching original source documents in their arguments as opposed to their liberal counterparts in the commentariat, who often tend to recite simply from memory Bush's Greatest Hits (on the country) without doing the same sort of fact-checking.  Here, however, I think Ms. Coulter's usually fine scholarship betrays her nonetheless, for the PDB does say:

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

Now if you stop right there, as Ms. Coulter, flashing exotic lengths of thigh from her little black dress, urges us to do on W's behalf, you must grant her main point, her main point being that she's a bimbo who's figured out how to parlay a cachectic body into many talk show appearances while writing very silly books.  And another point is that, in fact, W did stop right there and did not find out what those FBI reports of "suspicious activity" were, which included field reports about young Arab men learning to fly commercial airliners at American flight schools without bothering with the usual full curriculum, to wit, how to take off and land the damn things.  Now if George W. Bush was a serious man taking a serious job seriously, he would have raised holy hell about those reports.  Where's the follow up?  What's going on?  Who are these guys, and why are they doing this?  Instead, he read the report and then went out on the "ranch" and cut some more brush and went fishing with Barney.

Ann Coulter doesn't mention any of that, and she relies on our laziness in not cross-checking the PDB with the 9/11 Commission Report which reproduces the actual FBI field reports in full, all of which would have been available to our incurious President if he had been, you know, competent.

Anyway, the past is prologue and it's all kind of scary now.  I hate to see these pictures of Barack hanging out with Bush at these friendly lunches, just as I cringed when Nancy Pelosi went for tea at the White House after the Dems took over majority control of the House in 2006.  It's very collegial and all, but it tends to perpetuate business as usual and a reluctance to rock the boat, and rocking the boat till it capsizes is more what we need than "continuity of government," because our government has sucked.

And then Barack starts talking about "reforming" Social Security as part of his grand strategy for dealing with our many financial nightmares.  I understand that "everything must be on the table" when you're facing disaster, but Social Security is fully funded at the present level of benefits through about 2040 if the government grants full faith and credit to the trillions of dollars socked away in its "special issue" Treasury bonds purchased with excess FICA payments over the last 25 years.  So what Barry is actually hinting at is that maybe, just maybe, the government needs to default on its obligations to itself.  If Obama really believes that it's necessary to "reform" Social Security, meaning, of course, to cut benefits rather than to honor these IOUs, then his vaunted desire for "transparency" should also motivate him to announce to foreign creditors holding essentially identical debt instruments, such as China, Saudi Arabia and "Caribbean Island banking centers," that default is now the order of the day.

It's unlikely that Obama will take this second step, especially in light of the report in yesterday's New York Times that China is already pulling back on Treasury purchases in light of its own serious economic problems.  Without a funding source for America's huge deficits, there is simply no way that Obama or the Congressional Clown Troupe can possibly finance a "recovery program" or even the day-to-day operations of the federal government.  And at that point you can pound a For Sale sign in front of Obama's new home.

So man up, O.  Don't pull a Bush and start the shuck and jive crap of your predecessor.  On points like this, it's critical to spell out what the consequences of such "reforms" actually entail, and to describe in detail the embezzlement of FICA money that has been misdirected into the military establishment over the last quarter century.  Otherwise, you're going to slip inexorably into the Beltway conspiracy against the American people.  You promised, after all, to be our President.  We've had eight years of a guy working the other side and we need a change.

 

The Rotary Club & Other Espionage Agencies

I read through an interesting interview between conservative radio guy Hugh Hewitt (whose parents apparently lacked a certain felicity in choosing names) and Glenn Greenwald, whose column on Salon is linked to the right.  I admire Mr. Greenwald a lot; his analyses of media complacency in the face of the lawlessness of the Bush Administration are non pareil and frequently hilarious. It's hard to top his irony.  I assume that Mr. Greenwald is of Jewish lineage, though I don't want to jump to ethnic conclusions.  It's not essential anyway; Mr. Greenwald is a liberal and a civil libertarian (labels which can be applied to me as well, faut de mieux), and his attitudes about Israel represent the mainstream of the liberal position these days.  I'm not exactly sure what that position is, but it's definitely anti-Israel.

Mr. Greenwald begins the interview by affirming Israel's right to exist.  In my opinion, that would have been a good place to quit as well, because it's the essential question.  Mr. Greenwald, whose expertise is law and the Constitution, does not really need to join the cadres of Israel bashers with his own second-hand analysis of news reports from the battle zone.  But he can't help himself, because he's a Liberal and this is what Liberals do now, have opinions about Israel.  Negative opinions.  So he gives us this: 

HH: So what do you want, what do you think Israel ought to do?

GG: Well, I think that, for one thing, I think that real negotiations need to ensue, and I think those can only happen with a powerful and devoted mediator, which probably is a role that only the United States can play. So I think the Israelis need to be a lot more willing to make concessions than they’ve been in the past, and I also think that doing things like expanding settlements in the West Bank and blockading the Gazans to the point where they can’t even get nutrition and medical needs for their children are things that clearly harm their own interests, and make the conflict worse. I think stopping settlements, making concessions in the West Bank, and giving the Gazans more of a decent life so they don’t think it’s worthwhile to blow themselves up and shoot rockets at their oppressors is a really good first step.

I have to admit this sounds very nice: let's talk.  And what shall we talk about?  Well, one item that might be on the agenda would concern the 7,200 rockets that Hamas has fired at Ashkelon, Sderot and other southern Israeli cities during the last 5 years.  These rockets were fired at Israel with the intention of killing anyone near their point of landing; this sort of attack represents the most indiscriminate form of civilian targeting you can imagine.  That's inconvenient for Mr. Greenwald, and for the liberal view generally, but they have comebacks.  What about those illegal settlements in the West Bank?  Well, Hamas is not in power in the West Bank; they were elected in Gaza, and it is from Gaza that the rockets are launched.  So can we focus on that?  And why does Hamas fire rockets at Israel?  Because it denies Israel's right to exist. This is another inconvenient truth for the modern American liberal view of Israel.  One nasty habit of conservatives, including even the much-maligned Ann Coulter, is that they tend to read source documents.  This causes all kinds of havoc for the feel-good bromides of the liberal position.  The Hamas Charter of 1988, after menacingly warning the Freemasons, Lions Club and Rotary Club that they're on to their role as Zionist espionage agencies (some stuff you just can't make up), lays it out: 

[Peace] initiatives, the so-called peaceful solutions, and the international conferences to resolve the Palestinian problem, are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement. For renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of the religion; the nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its faith, the movement educates its members to adhere to its principles and to raise the banner of Allah over their homeland as they fight their Jihad: “Allah is the all-powerful, but most people are not aware.” From time to time a clamoring is voiced, to hold an International Conference in search for a solution to the problem. Some accept the idea, others reject it, for one reason or another, demanding the implementation of this or that condition, as a prerequisite for agreeing to convene the Conference or for participating in it. But the Islamic Resistance Movement, which is aware of the [prospective] parties to this conference, and of their past and present positions towards the problems of the Muslims, does not believe that those conferences are capable of responding to demands, or of restoring rights or doing justice to the oppressed. Those conferences are no more than a means to appoint the nonbelievers as arbitrators in the lands of Islam. Since when did the Unbelievers do justice to the Believers? “And the Jews will not be pleased with thee, nor will the Christians, till thou follow their creed. Say: Lo! the guidance of Allah [himself] is the Guidance. And if you should follow their desires after the knowledge which has come unto thee, then you would have from Allah no protecting friend nor helper.” Sura 2 (the Cow), verse 120 There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by Jihad. 

This is flowery, of course, but I don't think there's any great mystery about what Hamas is saying.  For one thing, Hamas uses an extremely broad definition of  "Palestine," including such areas as Tel Aviv, Haifa and all of Jerusalem, which we might otherwise think of as Israel.  They don't want "conferences," (none of that Camp David stuff) and they don't want to talk.  It's odd that liberals have such a hard time taking them at their word; they certainly demonstrate their disinterest in talking by firing 7,200 rockets at Israeli towns over the last five years.  The provocation of Israel is part of a plan for destroying Israel, not "retaliation" designed to bring Israel to the bargaining table.

One problem that Americans have in understanding Israel's response is that it's difficult for us to relate to a country that gives a damn about its own national security.  If you rain rockets down on Sderot and Ashkelon, then you're going to deal with the IDF. It's really that simple.  The United States was attacked on 9/11, and the most famous, the signature, response to that outrage was to use it as a propaganda tool for invading Iraq, which played no role in the terrorist strike.  When New Orleans drowned, most Americans saw the tragedy as a TV show; President Bush didn't even bother to watch it on TV.  He was playing air guitar in San Diego.  

These are important cultural differences.  Thinkers like Mr. Greenwald, so accomplished and effective in other areas, project American attitudes about crisis onto Israel and arrive at the dubious conclusion that Israel ought to be as sloppy, incoherent and soft about its safety as the United States is.  The point is that Israel can't.  Israel wants to get rid of Hamas because Hamas wants to get rid of Israel. If the liberal position is to favor Hamas, then stop the parsing of Israeli "tactics," stop the enumeration of schools hit by tank fire and the scenes of hospital corridors and the rest of it, and go to the jugular: simply state your concluding premise.  You agree with Hamas; Israel should not exist.  Then the liberal criticism of Israel has integrity and internal coherence. It's intellectually honest. If you are driven by anti-Semitism, that also has the ring of authenticity, because it's difficult to believe your real motivation is compassion for Arabs you've never visited and know nothing about. You have become a Hamas jihadist yourself, arriving at that position from whatever point on the compass brought you here.  You would like to see a "solution," as the Hamas Charter declares, take the form of a Second Holocaust.

My Peeps Come of Age

In that day and age at Berkeley there was, in truth, a kind of revulsion at the practical demands of everyday living.  Fraternities were in sharp decline because they were seen as institutions of outmoded values (connections, wealth, Old Boy networks), and the more free-form aspirations of the Information Age were taking root.  Not many of my contemporaries really aspired to make it as Organization Men.  Of course, the downside of such a conceit is that organizations have inherent power not generally available to the solo flyer.  I think this accounts, in some ways, for the ascendancy of such strange "leaders" as George W. Bush and Karl Rove: the field of "leadership" was to a large extent abandoned by what you might call the intellectual elite.

Many, if not nearly all, of my contemporaries moved into such fields as teaching, law, medicine and careers other than in Big Business and manufacturing (and I don't know anyone who went into politics).  The field of business was seen as somehow "co-opted."  One problem with this morally rarefied approach is that the things business does nevertheless remain absolutely essential--food, shelter, autos, furniture, energy--and whether my peeps wanted to get involved in the production end of such activities was not an answer to the necessity of participating in the consuming end.

The American Standard of Living, in terms of real earnings, peaked around 1974.  This coincides with the first Oil Shock, when America was held hostage by OPEC countries because of its support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War of the preceding year.  I doubt that it's coincidental that this was about the time my generation entered the Main Sequence of their careers.  It's always extremely difficult (as in impossible) to analyze a system as complex as American society in terms of rigorously controlled variables and equations.  Social science dabbles in such pursuits without any real hope of knowing anything; nevertheless, human curiosity always leads us toward a search for some understanding, however partial or notional, of the times we live in.  And whether we can really state as a series of provable propositions the factors that led America to its present state, we intuitively grasp that our condition must result from the aggregation, the Σ effect, of all the choices, lifestyles and belief systems of the people living in the society.  The "economy" is one powerful indicator of what's going on in a society; even Henry David Thoreau gave his longest chapter this very rubric in Walden.  And the economy flat-lined about the time my generation moved into positions of economic power.

That by itself is fascinating.  I recall writing earlier about Christopher Lasch's work of pop social psychology, The Culture of Narcissism, which attempted to get a handle on the "therapeutic society" he thought America had become: one less concerned about actually doing things than with the appearance of having done so and the maintenance of high self-esteem based on such images.  Lasch had his own agenda, which was driven by a curious mix of Freudian anti-capitalism, and I think he could have seen more clearly than he did if he hadn't been constrained by the Procrustean limitations of his a priori beliefs.  Still, I think he was on to something.

My generation might have taken its professed "idealism" and worked out a new way of having an economy; specifically, our generation was the one ideally placed to put the world on a course toward real environmental sustainability.  To place humans in a balanced ecological framework is the last frontier of existence and purpose.  It is the real solution to the Age of Anxiety, scarcity and the bad conscience that comes from our "Dominionist" arrogance.  All during the youth and early middle age of my generation, there were voices that wrote powerfully about what it would take: Wendell Berry, Barry Commoner, Stewart Brand, Amory Lovins, many others.  Sustainable agriculture, solar power, desalination of seawater, efficient habitats, mass transporation, localization of markets.

Instead, driven by the consumer choices of my generation, we moved in exactly the opposite direction.  The flat-lined Seventies were followed by the go-go Eighties.  You may recall the abbreviation "A&M" from that era, from such shows as "L.A. Law" and movies such as "Wall Street."  Acquisitions and Mergers.  The consolidation of economic power in fewer and fewer hands.  It was solid work for the vast phalanxes of lawyers produced by My Peeps.  Thus, the rise of holding companies, big box chain stores, franchise food, agribusiness, crap jobs and the "service" economy. By the time the Nineties rolled around, it seemed inevitable that all these bad choices would be followed up with the creation of the most popular form of transportation in American history: the SUV.

I sometimes wonder how a generation which prided itself in such an ostentatious way on the purity of its idealism could wind up in such a wrecked, wasteful, increasingly backward economy presided over by a cretin like George W. Bush.  The answer, I suspect, lies somewhere in the ruminations of Christopher Lasch. Maybe what went on is that my generation substituted talking about the ideal society for the actual work of producing the real thing.  No one went into politics where policy might have been shaped.  We made choices reminiscent of our parents' choices in houses, cars, modes of living, except everything had to be much bigger, grander and more wasteful.  The money we didn't earn we borrowed, in increasing amounts.  In this we were only following the dubious example set by the federal government, which decided that nothing needed to be paid for now if the money to finance it (wars, a big defense budget, anything) could be borrowed, increasingly from foreign governments in nations where savings were not a thing of the past, as here.

And now we've hit the wall. The automatic assumption is that this "downturn" is cyclical, as all previous recessions have been. Here we return to the Analogy Axiom, which instructs us that apparently analogous situations are useful only if the facts are essentially the same in both cases.  And the really bad news can be stated in rather stark terms: they're not.

My Peeps, An Intro

As the aleatory processes of the Universe would have it, I attended the University of California, Berkeley campus, during the years 1966 through 1970.  I sometimes free-ride on the modern cachet of this credential; that is to say, modern American kids who want to do likewise, those frenetic and obsessive grinds, look upon Berkeley as some sort of Holy Grail, and so my membership among its multitudinous alumnae is looked upon as something of a singular achievement.  In truth, I do little to dissuade them from this delusion.  Way back when, when California was a far less populous state and comprised mainly of Anglo-Saxon liberal arts majors, it really wasn't all that big a deal.  Berkeley was certainly nothing special as far as a place to get an undergraduate degree.  A professor actually interested in pedagogy was immediately marked by his peers as a scholastic mediocrity.  An award for excellence in teaching was virtually certain to get a prof knocked off the tenure track.

Still, because of the Vietnam War, Nixon, Kissinger, Cambodia, Reagan as governor of the state (you see, kids, bad times are not confined to the historical present), and Berkeley's well-deserved rep as a center of protest, the extramural aspects of being there then were definitely memorable. It was a wild scene, man, I'll grant you that.  The immediacy of an unpopular, scary, bloody war in which you might be compelled to fight gave everything a vivid realness - these weren't abstract ideas, like whether we ought to remake the Middle East along the lines of Neocon wet dreams.

Everyone who graduated from high school around 1966 is now either older than sixty or pushing up against that Rubicon. So it's fair to say that the past 40+ years have actually been The Generation of Flower Children Ascendant.  Whatever's gone on has been the handiwork of that generation's exercise of control. To be intellectually honest, we have to count George W. Bush among our number, but I consider him an outlier in the cohort. He was just sort of a weird anomaly from a half-wit dynasty.  Far more typical of our generation was Bill Clinton, a man who rose high above stupidity only to be brought down by cupidity.

Clinton, in fact, is something of a perfect avatar for the Sixties generation.  Possessed of an IQ two or three standard deviations above the population mean, and a big conceptual thinker, he couldn't really think of anything to do with the power he acquired other than to use it to satisfy his prodigious personal appetites. When he left office, he devoted himself to a feverish capitalization on his celebrity.  When it was revealed he had made over $100 million since leaving office, no one bothered to compare his singularity of true purpose (greed) with his idealistic noises.  It wasn't even worth talking about, and it was nothing that would even occur to those of us in his generation.

Paradoxically, I think the generation of which I was a part is one of the least idealistic generations in American history.  I'm mindful always of the blind-men-and-the-elephant parable (one of the more lapidary of our folk tales), and the trap it implies, but when I think back on everyone I knew in those Berkeley days, the thing that strikes me is that no one I knew (and I include myself, of course) did much other than slump down into the Suburban Project that the Clusterf**k Man rails about on the linked site to your right.  Despite all the noises that we made about "materialism" and America's hoggish overuse of energy, its disproportionate contribution to environmental damage, it wasn't as if we ever let that get in the way of our own pursuit of comfort, American Style.  We simply built on the modest prosperity of our parents' generation to provide ourselves with a more fully elaborated form of affluence.

The older I get, the more I believe that the one core truth reached by Karl Marx is in his Manifesto was his insistence that "material" conditions in a society are formative of consciousness. There was no "trial by fire" of my generation, no privation, no Great Depression, no Good War.  There was a war to avoid (and our national leaders, by and large, all avoided it), and the rest of life was devoted to acquisition, pleasure, indulgence. 

As I sort of said in the last number, one of the reasons I think the plight of the Palestinians has become such a hot cause celebre for modern Liberals is that outgunned brown people provide a kind of Revolutionary Fantasy Camp for our "idealistic compassion," which is always looking for someplace to alight.  In point of fact, Hamas is dedicated to the principle that a Jewish state cannot exist in the heart of the Muslim Arab world.  This is the announced policy of its leader, and it is the (non-idealistic) reality that Israel deals with.  It is difficult for Americans to relate to the urgency of such a situation because the truth of the matter is that we have no similar existential enemies.  We think that Israel should counter-attack a rain of missiles on towns bordering Gaza by writing blogs and letters to the editor, or by arguing vociferously at dinner parties, the way we Americans do.  Or even through street demonstrations, which we consider really, really radical.

On the Berkeley campus now one is much more apt to find a pro-Palestinian demonstration than any expression of support for Israel.  Back in the day, we all walked around with our hearts in our mouths waiting for the latest news of the Six Day War, wondering whether Israel would survive.  Such are the winds of change.  Nothing much really changed in the United States to account for the difference in opinion.  We remained the same fickle intellectual dilettantes, with no true skin in the game, that we had always been.  Our life's work has been the avoidance of pain and want and the maximizing of pleasure and wealth; yet paradoxically this vocation has brought us to the edge of the economic abyss.  I think, in the effort to make life easy, we have guaranteed that it's going to be very, very hard.  I kind of shudder to think how my generation will deal with true hardship.

Once I was young and impulsive
I wore every conceivable pin
Even went to the socialist meetings
Learned all the old union hymns
But I've grown older and wiser
And that's why I'm turning you in
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal.

Phil Ochs, "Love Me I'm A Liberal"

So What Should Israel Do?

To read the discussions of Israel's retaliation against Hamas in Gaza is to experience something akin to the feeling one has on arriving late at a movie and trying to understand the sequence of events unfolding on screen.  The film's been running for awhile, let's say, and a guy who needs a shave walks into a seedy bar, pulls a gun and shoots another guy sitting on a stool apparently minding his own business, who turns in the last instant to face his assailant and registers surprise at seeing him.

That's all you know.  The modern Leftist sentiment, which is anti-Israel, would focus on these factors: the killer had a gun and the victim didn't.  It was unexpected.  The victim died and the killer walked away.  Everything must be done to stop this senseless bloodshed, preferably by way of UN Resolution.

Most Leftist criticism of Israel operates at about that level.  The questions that are not answered, or even addressed, are these: In the absence of Palestinian provocation (firing rockets indiscriminately into towns such as Sderot), would there be any Israeli military action at all?  Second question: if the Israeli response is "disproportionate," what level of response would be effective so that Hamas stops shelling civilian populations in Israeli towns near the Gaza border?

If Leftist critics deign to deal with such questions at all, the responses usually run along these lines: Israel's attacks are a "massacre" of innocents and a form of "collective punishment" for the attacks directed by Hamas, the civilian government in Gaza. As to the second question, certainly some form of retaliation is justified under international law, but whatever it is that Israel is doing, it's too much.  

If one then points out that firing rockets into towns such as Sderot is also a form of "collective punishment," since the town folk there are not the same thing as the Knesset in Tel Aviv, the movie is rewound a little bit to introduce a new element.  It turns out that the Hamas rocket attacks are actually justified by the blockade (land, sea & air) of Gaza by the Israelis.  Naturally, pro-Israeli advocates will point out that this blockade was the very sort of "non-military" sanction or "retaliation" which Leftist American sentiment is now demanding in place of the military attacks, to which Israel resorted because the blockade failed to stop the rocket attacks, and the blockade was the sort of "non-occupying" tactic employed by the Israelis after they pulled all military from Gaza (as the American Left demanded).  Hamas then used the power vacuum to stage rocket attacks from Gaza free from Israeli interference, in order to provoke Israel into a retaliation which can be condemned by the American Left, who like condemning Israel.  And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut used to say.

The movie, it turns out, has been running much, much longer than you dreamed possible when you first took your seat.  While it's true that the Israeli blockade was a measured response to a violent program of indiscriminate rocket attacks and Hamas anti-Israel agitation generally, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and its expansion of borders generally since the Six Day War of 1967, are the actual proximate and justifying causes of the Hamas rocket attacks.  In turn, the Israeli partisans (who never lack for historical scholarship on such matters) point out that the Six Day War, and the retention of "strategic depth" since 1967, were themselves reactions to Arab attacks on the integrity (and survival) of Israel.

Which brings us back to 1948, when the movie actually started running.  This is why I find it's always easier just to start there and find out from the person who directs such criticisms at Israel whether he/she simply disputes Israel's right to exist.  That's actually the fulcrum point.  If someone supports Israel's right to exist, then of course it doesn't take long to reach agreement that Israel has the right to retaliate against military attacks against its own people.  One might argue about specific tactics, or the extent of appropriate retaliation, or whether some pacifistic party in control in Tel Aviv might produce a better result with less bloodshed -- these are all legitimate points of discussion.  But the kneejerk condemnation of Israel for doing anything at all would not be the main focus of the argument.

Yet that's precisely the focus of the discussion which emanates from the American Left.  Sometimes I think this irrationality can best be explained by a form of high-flown anti-Semitism: a persistent anti-Jew feeling dressed up in the rarefied dialectic of international relations.  Another possibility, more Freudian and perhaps complementary to the first point, is that the fairly recent emergence of Israel as a country in world history allows the liberal intellectual an opportunity to discharge a gnawing point of discomfort and cognitive dissonance.  Israel was "imposed" on a native Arab population.  Sure, maybe for altruistic and compassionate reasons at the time, but still an act of European colonial imperialism.  And the Left hates Euro-American colonial imperialism.  The only problem is that the USA itself was founded through just such an "imposition;" indeed, an imposition a great deal worse, since there were no pre-Columbian Europeans living for thousands of years among the Native Americans at the time of the Western usurpation.

Well, we aren't going to do anything about the Apache or Navajo or Seminole or Algonquin or Cherokee Indians.  But by golly, we'll stand up for the Palestinians because, hell, that's so easy! It's not like deeding my own extensive real estate back to Ishi and the Coastal Miwok, or giving People's Park back to the Costanoans, as the old Berkeley radicals wanted to do (see? they were principled and walked the walk, not like modern American leftist dilettantes.)  We'll be in solidarity with them because they're the low-tech side of the military confrontation, and anyway, the Bush Administration supports Israel, so they can't be right.

One thing I'm pretty sure of: one will never understand the hail of criticism directed Israel's way by rules of logic applicable everywhere else.  Israel's people are attacked; they respond in kind.  Seems simple enough, but only because you left to get some popcorn at a critical moment.

Bush Administration's Greatest Hits

It is that time of year when columnists, pundits, movie critics and even bloggers tend to write "Best" lists for the preceding 12 months.  This particular New Year's Eve we stand at the juncture of a truly great event, the End of the Bush Era in American Life.  Perhaps then it is fitting to reflect on some of the singular accomplishments of the Bushian National Nightmare not only of this past year, but of the preceding seven as well.

1.  The Complete Absence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq:  We all have our personal favorites, I'm sure, but for me this event, this occurrence, this unbelievable fact, represents Bush's Sistine Chapel Ceiling.  I consider it the single greatest error ever made by any President of the United States in the history of the Republic.  It is difficult to get one's mind around it because you blow your own mind in the process.  Regardless of latter-day historical revisionism, the fact remains that the main, the chief, the only rationale for invading Iraq was that it constituted an act of preemptive self-defense (surely very controversial even at that) against a "clear, present and gathering danger" to the security of the USA.  Not a single cannister of nerve gas, nor a single vial of anthrax, nor a gram of weapons-grade uranium has ever been found within the borders of Iraq despite our virtual ownership of the country for the past six years.  This colossal blunder, this incomparable error in judgment, constituted the basis on which we committed the military forces of the United States with consequences which have been detailed on this blog and everywhere else for numerous years.

2.  Hurricane Katrina:  The range of Bush's incompetence is perhaps his defining characteristic.  While the American public watched the city of New Orleans drown on national television, Bush, FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security remained unaware that there was any sort of problem there. Bush breathed a sigh of relief and remarked that we "had dodged a bullet."  

3.  The Reintroduction of Torture by a Modern Twenty-First Century Democracy:  This is another of Bush's signature accomplishments.  As with Iraq & Katrina, I think it will take years, perhaps a decade, before the enormity of what Bush has done in this field can be truly evaluated and placed in context. Bush specifically approved the use of waterboarding, a form of torture devised during the Spanish Inquisition and prosecuted by the United States against the Japanese as a war crime following World War II.

4.  The Establishment of a Concentration Camp in Guantanamo: As the stories leak out, it becomes increasingly apparent that Bush, with the aiding & abetting of his consigliere Alberto Gonzales, created a legal black hole in Cuba where hundreds of innocent men who had nothing to do with a "war on terror" were incarcerated in cages and denied, for years on end, any form of challenge to the legality of their detention.

5.  The Obstruction of International Efforts to Deal with Global Warming and Ocean Acidification:  Perhaps in no other arena have Bush's innate anti-social tendencies wreaked greater havoc, and with such ominous long-term consequences, than in his obdurate, non-scientific, malicious interference with the international consensus that drastic and immediate responses are needed to deal with climate change.  He has sided with the yahoo, know-nothing idiots who have watched passively as the accelerating effects of climate change (which have tended, in nearly every instance, to be worse than the long-range predictions of the IPCC) have engulfed the world.

These are highlights, but of course any summary of Bush must be truncated to avoid rewriting something approaching the combined length of War & Peace and Moby Dick.  Historians will have to figure Bush out in the fullness of time.  One question that always perplexed me: what was Bush for?  It doesn't suffice to say he was for a "strong America," because he ignored the clear warning signals preceding the attacks of 9-11.  He wrecked the military by overusing it in unnecessary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  He destroyed the nation's economy through a reckless and stupid regime of "deregulation."  He leaves behind a trillion dollar annual budget deficit for the US government, reeling safety net and health programs, and the essential bankruptcy of all 50 states.  Had he actually designed administration policy with the specific intent of damaging the safety and common welfare of the American citizenry, it is difficult to see how he could have surpassed his actual record of destruction.  75% of the American population disapprove of his presidency and are "anxious" for him to leave office.  The other 25%, of course, are clinically insane.  

So one must look out upon this vast landscape of destruction and conclude, as perplexing as the conclusion might seem, that this is actually what Bush wanted.  He wanted to wreck the country and found the best (which is to say: worst) people he could hire to help him do it.  As Sherlock Holmes instructed, in deducing the truth one must eliminate all possibilities until one is left with a single explanation that fits the facts.  And that explanation, however unlikely it might have seemed at the outset, must be the truth.

Twenty Days of Bush

As I begin writing this, Bush has 20 days and 9 hours left.  While he has been preoccupied over the last month or so with environmental destruction of a truly deranged character (opening wilderness up to mining, for example, and Endangering Species already listed as Endangered Species under the Endangered Species Act), I suspect that the last 3 weeks or so are going to be devoted to business of a more personal nature.  To wit, undertaking necessary measures to ensure his own freedom from incarceration over the balance of his life.

One thing we know about Bush is that the outrageous does not faze him.  The commutation of sentence of Scooter Libby, for example, was so clearly a repudiation of his own pledge to deal harshly with classified information leakers within his administration that one might have been forgiven for thinking that even Bush, that most hypocritical and morally indifferent of men, would second-guess himself on that one.  No, he went right ahead with it.  He didn't even pretend that the putative reason given (the sentence was "too severe," although it was actually less than federal sentencing guidelines) had any plausibility.  He would have been content, I'm sure, to give no reason whatsoever.  I am virtually certain that one of the things he'll do during these last 20 days is to grant Libby a full pardon.

I suspect, however, that Bush is reluctant to grant himself a pardon, either through an unprecedented auto-pardon or by the Cheney Two-Step, where Bush resigns close to the end of his term so that Cheney can preside over the Bush Absolution.  There may, in fact, be legal ramifications to resignation of a President, even for so brief a period as one day, of which I'm unaware.  But mainly I think that Bush, who is in a curious way obsessed with his "legacy" (a narcissistic fussiness about his historical image), does not like the ignominy which attaches to so craven a legal dodge.

Which must mean that his Administration is actively engaged in conversations with the Obama transition team. The historical precedent is the Nixon-Ford "understanding" reached at the time Nixon resigned.  Ford, for the good of the country, would put it "all behind us."  Certainly, in the smoking ruin that Bush has bequeathed us there are plenty of rationales for getting things behind us so we can focus on pressing concerns such as our economic survival. 

In a larger sense, however, a Bush Auto-Pardon would contradict the reigning ethos of the Bush Administration.  Bush& Cheney are devoted to the principles of illegality without accountability; it is their credo, their calling, in a way.  The Unitary Executive was an exercise in lawlessness.  They were most at home with themselves when blatantly breaking the law and defying a prostrate Congress to do anything about it, which Congress never did.  Never even a successful censure motion.  Think about that.  With all we know about what has gone on, from the fraud used to sell an unnecessary war, to the lack of preparation and seriousness re: the attacks of 9/11, to the torture regime, to the warrantless wiretapping, to the felonious disclosure of a CIA agent's identity, not a single peep out of Congress.  That, more than anything, will be the the Bush/Cheney Legacy: a completely broken system of checks and balances.  And any act of contrition, such as that implied in a pardon, even if prophylactic, demeans this proud legacy of doing whatever they felt like doing. It would almost amount to some sort of tacit admission of doing something wrong.

It's a chancy play, an obeisance to vanity, but I think Bush will risk it.  He will sneer at Congress one more time by going "bare," leaving office with no pardon in his pocket.  It's probably not that great a risk.  Since the attitude of indifference is now so firmly established, since Congress, no matter who's in charge, seems institutionally incapable of taking remedial action, I suspect that Bush may safely forgo that final safety measure of complete executive exoneration.  He will strut out of the Oval Office one last time on January 20, having hastily signed a final batch of Executive Orders authorizing nuclear testing in ANWR, and oil drilling in Lake Tahoe, and head off toward the sunset in the West, to his strange retirement in Texas.  If he does things that way, I doubt that Cheney will get a pardon either.  It's not like Bush to be selfless.  He'll withhold Cheney's clemency out of spite, just to razz him.

Obama & Co will look into things, form a commission, let the statute of limitations expire, and that will be that.  We'll all move ahead as if nothing happened.  We don't want to criminalize, you know -- policy differences.  Or much of anything else, as long as it happened in the Beltway.  The true Bush Legacy is that the nation's capital has become an accountability-free zone.

Back in the USSA, Reprised

Been away so long I hardly knew the place,

Gee, it's good to be back home.

Leave it to tomorrow to unpack my case,

Honey, disconnect the phone,

I'm back in the U.S.S....

A."   "Back in the USSR" (almost), John Lennon & Paul McCartney

With "change" in the air, the Magical Thinkers are enjoying a Renaissance.  The Resident Hysteric at the New York Times, the noted Friedman Unit, recently called for a "reboot" of America as Obama takes charge.  Conflating his two most recent columns, I get the idea that unless we enact Friedman's cherished idea of a gasoline tax immediately, we're toast, and we'll never have high speed rail or battery technology or a green economy, because without that tariff, Americans will just go back to buying used SUVs and Hummers.  The Unit said so.  Also, that the "next few months" will be among the most important in U.S. history.

I appeal to the good judgment of the American people: does anyone seriously believe that major changes in the basic way this country does business, lives, works and gets around the landscape, will be in place by, for example, June, 2009? Friedman, who travels a lot, keeps seeing the high speed rail of China and Europe, with their vastly superior Internet infrastructure, and the roll-out of the Chinese electric car and the Israeli nationwide system of electric vehicles with renewable electric power, and The Unit asks: why not us?

I would add to his list a fascinating piece in the Times recently which detailed the development of the "passive thermal" house in Darmstadt and elsewhere in Germany (a phenomenon spreading throughout the Northern tier of Europe), wherein hermetically-sealed houses are built without furnaces and maintain their comfortable temperatures with energy usage equivalent to a single hair dryer.  About 1/20th of a conventional furnace-heated house.  The houses are super-insulated, use an ingenious heat-exchanger to bring fresh air in from the outside, and cost only slightly more to build (in Germany) than conventional houses, because in Germany, you see, they have the technology, materials and inclination to use them.  It is the way out of dependence on natural gas supplies from Russia - simple, brilliant, vibrantly Green.

Our foreign energy dependence is certainly no less dire - about 70% of our petroleum is imported.  Yet the Unit concedes that unless Americans are in effect blackmailed (through a gasoline tax), they will more or less immediately revert to their old patterns of buying gas hogs.  Indeed, with the average price per gallon now again below two bucks, this is beginning to happen. In December trucks and SUVs outsold cars, and hybrid car sales took a beating.

The Unit was born in 1953, which makes him old enough to be susceptible to a fallibility which a psychiatrist I know calls the "trance of everyday living," a useful heuristic tool for analyzing things you hear people say which seem at odds with what you perceive with your own senses.  In essence, our Gestalt of perception is formed in childhood and shapes our interaction with the real world.  We imagine that The Others in our lives think and behave in line with a certain number of notional prototypes, based on our childhood experiences.  So The Unit is more or less mentally trapped in the go-go spirit of the American Colossus, the superpower, the inventive, infinitely adaptable U.S.A. of his youth.  Thus, he imagines that this huge juggernaut, which has been headed in the wrong direction economically, environmentally, culturally, militarily, for over 30 years can be "rebooted" through the incantation of Hi-TechSpeak, as easily as hitting the Restart button on Windows.  And taking shape on the screen as it boots up: A Brand New America.

Not so fast, Friedman.  Believe me, you will get the economic privation which you believe is essential to readjustment of attitudes, but it will come about as the result of natural processes and not government policy.  The United States is fundamentally changing now, but it has nothing to do with a capitalist fantasy of regeneration.  We are turning into the United Socialist States of America because the old system we were running has crashed and burned.  It has all happened so fast that we haven't taken in just how deep and basic these changes are.  The changes we will see in those "next few months" include the death of the U.S. auto industry, for example, which will result in the subtraction of a large percentage from the small residual manufacturing base of this country.  The financial system has already been poleaxed. The housing market is in ruins.  The crap job economy is now even incapable of producing enough crap jobs.  Roads, bridges, schools, national health - all moving toward Third World status.

To get to the Eden of The Unit's pipe dream, we first have to continue along our devolutionary path, and for quite a while longer than a "few months."  The huge "recovery plan" which has been forced on the Obama Administration is not the result of some minor glitch in the way things work here, but reflects a fundamental failure of the system.  Obama/Biden, and the economists advising them, are undertaking this crash program not as a "tweak," not as a "reboot," but as a desperate measure to avoid catastrophe.  Even at that, it seems unlikely that we're going to be allowed to remain in a trance too much longer.

Gay Marriage Considered Under the Equal Protection Clause

Perhaps it would be good, from time to time, to drop the grandiloquence and the witty turn of phrase and do more close-in legal analysis of some things which are in the public realm of discussion these days.  Such as, gay rights & gay marriage, two issues given higher visibility by the nomination of Rick Warren as the Communicator with our Invisible Friend as the religious start of a secular proceeding next month.  (First question: why are we praying at a state function?  It's unConstitutional in the extreme.)

I am taken to task from time to time for not observing the distinction which the Christian Evangelicals, as exemplified by Rick Warren and his Orange County cult, maintain between "tolerance" for homosexual activity and "endorsement" of such activity.  Herein, I am told, lies my failure to comprehend.  Evangelicals have "compassion" for gays; it's just that their belief system does not allow them to go so far as to "sanction" or "legitimize" such unholy practices as marriage between two persons of the same sex.  If I could understand this, you see, I would see The Light.

One wonders, of course, if the confidence of Evangelicals is this serene and untroubled, why Rick Warren told his Webmeister to take down the "No Gays Allowed" part of his website (saddlebackfamily.com) a few days ago.  It seems so...what's the phrase?  PR driven.  It's almost as if some deal got worked out by the Obama Transition Team and the madhouse in the OC.  (I was honestly trying to keep this post high minded, but it's just too much fun to write like this.  Sorry.)  Wouldn't you love to have a transcript of that telephone call?  "Hey Rick," Rahm says, "we don't mind you busting gays there in wherever the hell you are, but you gotta pull that 'Keep Out' sign from the website, capisc? We're taking some real heat from our side."  Rick:  "No problem. It's not like I believe any of this shit anyway.  It's just red meat for the Wal-Mart sales staff in the pews."  

Still...and along more serious lines.  The fundamental error in the specious distinction offered by the Evangelicals, which they use as a means of avoiding a charge of bigotry, is based on two false premises: First, civil rights in this country are not determined according to a religious standard.  And second, civil rights are not a matter of majoritarian "tolerance;" it is not the province of Evangelicals, or any other pressure group, to determine who gets to enjoy their fundamental human liberties.

The first error is based upon a confusion, in the case of gay marriage, between religious and secular institutions.  The state-sanctioned union of two people in marriage carries with it a great number of practical ramifications and exists as a legal arrangement. While the state permits marriage ceremonies to be performed by religious officials, marriage licenses are issued by the state.  You can get married with a marriage license in a ceremony performed by a judge, for example.  But the Catholic Church does not issue marriage licenses binding on the state.

Gay marriage offends the religious ideas of the Evangelical right wing because they perceive of marriage as a holy arrangement ordained by God.  That's fine if they want to believe that.  Such an attitude is not binding on the State.  The inability of the Evangelicals to see this easy and fundamental distinction lies at the root of their difficulty in being fair.  An analogy might make the point clearer.  If Evangelicals believed that the black man was a racial inferior who should be denied public office (as the Mormons, world leaders in this new intolerance, once did), that would not make the case for such discrimination.  The Equal Protection Clause would strike down the discrimination anyway, and the First Amendment's Establishment Clause would be cited in support of the ruling.

It is simply because "marriage" and "family" have acquired such a totemic, proprietary status among Evangelicals that they feel they have the right to enforce their bigotry in this area of civil rights. The "institution" of marriage will be threatened if gays are allowed to marry, they say.  No it won't.  The institution will be enhanced and made more generally available.  Pastor Rick's fear that gay marriage will lead to polygamy, pedophilia and incest, as he expressed in an interview on national TV, demonstrates only one thing: he's a really dumb guy, which is another reason I'm scratching my head over this Obama sell-out.  (Pastor Rick also expressed his desire to sleep with all the beautiful women he sees.  Oh man, there is going to be such a scandal someday down in Saddleback.  Obama is so going to regret this choice.)

The second point is that we don't subject fundamental civil liberties to popular vote.  We protect fundamental rights from "the tyranny of the majority," in de Tocqueville's wonderful phrase.  One day (ironically, after Obama replaces the Medieval thinker Antonin Scalia with a secular judge) the Supreme Court will rule, under the Equal Protection Clause, that gays, possessing an unalterable natural trait, sexual orientation, are denied equal protection on the basis of that innate characteristic by preventing them from marrying in the one, honest way they can.  This ruling will be, first, a victory of science over religious obscurantism and its sin-obsessed views of homosexuality, and second, a triumph of compassion and justice over bigotry.

As a civil libertarian and a believer in freedom of religion, I will, of course, go on arguing for the fundamental right of Evangelicals, Mormons, Catholics and others afraid of science and progress to be safe and secure in their discrimination and hatred, as long as it doesn't spill over into their old practices of violating secular laws, such as burning people at the stake.  Also, I would encourage them to read the New Testament a little more closely, since it doesn't really have a bad word to say about consensual homosexuality.  It was concerned with pederasty, a form of sexual assault upon adolescent prostitutes and slaves which was as much a problem among heterosexuals as the "gays" of Biblical times.  This is the sort of distinction which Pastor Rick, of course, is not likely ever to grok.  Jesus himself was a very tolerant guy; I'm pretty certain I know how he would have voted on Proposition 8.

A Christmas Story

The story surrounding the birth of Jesus on December 25 in Bethlehem is occasionally worth a second look, as part of one's own maturation process, because so much of what we take for granted about the story is based on childhood impressions that, for one reason or another, we never bother to disturb with later reading. The birth is described in what Christians call the "New Testament" and what Jewish scholars call "Mishagoss."  

I suppose it's actually unlikely that Jesus was born on December 25; one factor often cited is that the weather would not have been conducive to shepherds tending their flocks in the field.  But let's check today's weather in the West Bank and see:  It's 54 degrees, with an overnight low predicted of 40. Light rain.  C'mon: shepherds could hack that.  Other objections include the contention that Christians borrowed the birthdate of Mithra, a pagan character who was born on the Solstice of the old Julian calendar, which happens to be December 25.  Coincidences happen, I say.

Only Matthew and Luke actually write about the birth of Jesus. Mark & John shine it on, and pick up the story later.  Matthew goes into a lot of detail about Herod's role in the story.  Herod was a local despot and Roman puppet who heard about this birth and was a little worried about his sinecure being disturbed by the upstart.  So he convened a council of scribes and the rest of his cabinet to talk it over.  He's the one, according to Matthew, who sent the Magi to track down the newborn.  "Bring him to me, " he said, "so I can worship him too."  Heh heh.  That crafty Herod.  The Three Wise Men "followed a star" to Bethlehem, which was a neat trick, in a way, because Jerusalem was only about 8 kilometers from Bethlehem. Plus, stars tend to move east to west in the night sky, and Bethlehem is south of Jerusalem. Anyway, this star shone on one particular house in the West Bank and the Magi knew they had arrived. Matthew says it was just a house, by the way, not a manger.  Luke's story has the manger, which was fortunate because a lot of Christmas carols would not work without a manger.  Try singing "Away in a house..." if you don't believe me.

Never mind.  Matthew's always been a little sloppy, but what I like about him is his vivid imagination.  He came up with names for the gifts they gave to Jesus, and he also added the part where another angel comes to Joseph & Mary and tells them to go to Egypt to avoid Herod's ethnic cleansing, another in an apparently endless series of pogroms to which Jesus's people have been subjected.  So they decamp for several years, and Herod's slaughter of the innocents (all kids under two years old) rages through the Holy Land.

Herod's reputation would suffer more but for the historical game-changer that he died in 4 B.C.  I chalk this minor error up to Matthew's lack of access to Google.  It's easy to take potshots at Matthew now, because that looks like a huge blunder.  But keep it in context.  Anyway, Joseph & Mary return home after a few years.

Luke places J&M in Bethlehem to respond to a census ordered by the Roman Emperor.  They move from Nazareth to Bethlehem, which is odd since a census usually records where you live.  One must applaud Joseph's courage; to move his pregnant Jewish wife on a four-day journey.  "Hey!" she says.  "I'm about to blow here!"  "It's not my kid," Joseph retorts.  That's why the alter kakers liked Joseph at the card tables.  Always quick with a retort.

Although he knew it was his kid.  Matthew wasn't too good at translating Hebrew either, or maybe he was led astray by relying on a second-rate Greek translation. (How did Matt even get the job writing the first Gospel?  Where did he get his history degree, Oral Roberts?  Was he on a basketball scholarship?)  The ancient Hebrew word found in Isaiah 7:14 was "almah," which means a young woman of marriageable age, not a virgin.  "Bethulah" means virgin, but the Greek Septuagint translation renders "almah" as "parthenos," which indicates virginity.

Luke never has the doughty couple and their heralded offspring flee to Egypt.  They just go home after the "census," although maybe that didn't happen either, since there was no direct Roman rule over Nazareth or Bethlehem at the time of Jesus's birth.  I'm getting confused now, since I think this part of the history is screwed up by Luke, not Matthew.  Also, these census operations only applied to Roman citizens, and Joseph was a Galilean.  Other than that...What I will commend Luke for is that he doesn't libel the already-dead Herod by accusing him of mass murder.  The slaughter of the innocents is only in Matthew.

Yeah, there are other problems.  Matthew & Luke don't even agree on the name of Joseph's father, how many generations there were between David & Jesus, or even whether Jesus was within the "royal succession."  Jesus himself didn't seem to care and I commend him for it.  I commend him for a lot of things.  He doesn't need to be God for me to appreciate him as an extraordinary Jew born to a nice Jewish couple, and to honor his deep wisdom about ways that humans ought to conduct their lives and treat each other.  All this from a humble man, the son of a carpenter, a Jewish man, in other words, who made his living by being good with his hands -- now there's your Christmas Miracle.

You Too Can Be Successful

In our new Gilded Age it seems that only the Robber Barons really make out.  Reading about the pathetic saga of Bernard Madoff and his Ponzi scheme, one is led to think that in our society, where probably 99% of the populace go about their personal and wage-earning lives with integrity and a naive, trusting faith, that the Little Guy just doesn't have a chance anymore.  Add up all the cons, frauds, schemes, deregulation over the last twenty years or so and you must come to the conclusion that in modern American society, only crime pays.  Enron, the mutual fund scandals (inside dope to big investors, which Spitzer prosecuted - it's why he had to go), Martha Stewart, the subprime/Moody's/Big Investment Bank conspiracy -- these are headlines, but they barely scratch the surface.  The truth is that the entire financial system in the United States, including these vaunted "markets" that Bush/Paulson want to prop up, are all absolutely rotten to their core.  And in a decadent system where everyone has abandoned the idea of true productivity, the only people who are going to make money are the short-sell players (like John Paulson's hedge fund) and the crooks.

This is why it's so natural for Henry Paulson to embezzle $350 billion authorized by Congress and give it to friends and associates to reimburse them for the losses stemming from their criminal enterprises.  Congress members, like Barney Frank, cluck about it -- they're "disappointed," but they don't do anything.  It's actually what Congress expected.  Their campaign finance bills are paid by the same crooks.  Our liberal "friends" in high places, like Chuck Schumer of New York, who has personally guarded the capital gains rate tax advanage of hedge fund managers making billions; Joe Biden, who offered full-throated support for that awful Bankruptcy "Reform" Act to protect his credit card company friends -- get wise, little people. They are not looking out for you.  

When you look at it this way, you begin to see that the main difference between Bernard Madoff and someone like John Thune at Merrill Lynch is that Madoff dispensed with formalities and simply stole his investors' money outright.  He just cut out the pretend part - the part where he "invests" your money in some worthless "security" which evaporates like water on a Phoenix sidewalk in mid-July.  The investment bankers played a different game, which was to package millions of mortgages which they knew to be dodgy into huge "bonds," then paid Moody's to slap a Triple A sticker on this pile of crap, then used the imprimatur of the august, thoroughly corrupt ratings service to sell the "securities" to pension funds, hedge funds, high rollers and Norwegian School Teacher Credit Unions. The investment bank took its money at the front end; commissions and fees, which soared into the billions, which they doled out to the best con men among them.  Unfortunately for the banks, a lot of them also bought their own bullshit, or got caught up in credit default swaps which tied them inextricably into the demise of the American financial system.

So look -- why should you be left out?  When I was doing securities litigation a couple of decades ago, I studied the venerable art of the Ponzi scheme up close, as a lawyer trying to recover money for an "investor" in such a fraud.  It's not easy because Ponzi operators are not big on keeping detailed books.  The "books" which do exist are about nonexistent things: investments never made, dividends never paid.  I'm not saying in your own Ponzi scheme that you won't have to use your imagination - that's the fun!  Be like Bernard Madoff and give your pathological lying full latitude.  Make it all up.

He cheated his friends, Elie Wiesel, charities, Steven Spielberg, foundations, schools, hospitals, universities.  The one question I have to ask: aren't you sort of asking for it if you give your money to someone who pronounces his last name Made-off?  I guess.  On the other hand, it shows you just how far you can push things.  Could you set up a Ponzi called the Ima Rippov Fund? Why not try it?!

The basics are simple.  You have an external burn rate (EBR) and an Internal Burn Rate (IBR).  Let's see your fund in action.  It has a name, like Bernie's "Ascot Partners."  (Classy, huh?)  Yours has a marine theme - the "Pond Sea Fund."  That's pastoral and soothing, I think.  You start with ten good friends who put a million up (have them mortgage their houses to the 125% level) and you promise them 10% per annum. So your EBR (what you pay out) is $1 million per year.  You pay yourself $1 million too. You have to have fun while you're doing this.  Look at Bernie: apartment in Manhattan, house in the Hamptons, house in Palm Beach, villa in France, 55-foot yacht. It didn't all go strictly into overhead.

Your friends will do most of the work for you after that.  They're making 10% on their money!  Spread the word to children's cancer hospitals, the March of Dimes, disaster relief funds, Lighthouse for the Blind, your college alma mater - let them all in on this good thing.  The math does not change much.  When you hit $100 million, your EBR is still only $10 million, and you may as well increase your IBR to $10 million too.  Start buying real estate, nice second, third, fourth homes, in countries which do not allow extradition for financial crimes.  Also, get a good long range jet and a pilot who can fly beneath radar cover.

And whatever you do, don't make Bernard Madoff's mistake. Don't stay too long at the fair.  Sure, you could push your haul to $100 million, $500 million, a billion dollars.  What's the point beyond a certain number?  Finally, on that big day, you declare the Internal Burn Rate is going to 100%, payable immediately.  However much is in the Pond Sea Fund is yours. You wire it to that waiting account.  You put on your nice black suit and get into your nice black Mercedes and drive down to the general aviation field of your local airport where your fake flight plan (everything you've done for years is fake, this is easy) calls for a 3 am takeoff.  You leave all your troubles behind, including suicides among your friends, destitution, deaths of untreated children, fired teachers at the schools you destroyed, foreclosures left and right, alcoholism, despair, hopelessness.  Really, a whole lot like what an awful lot of Americans are going through after investing in "honest" securities with Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac.  So now you've done it - you've achieved a real American success. One not requiring a bailout, either!  But just like your heroes in the "straight" financial world, it's going to work best if you enjoy it somewhere else.

Economic Optimism & Other Illusions

Habitual Swimmers at the Pond are aware of my contention that Paul Krugman, ace economics columnist for the stately New York Times, is occasionally displaced by his Doppelganger, a guy who's not too bright and uses Krugman's byline.  Recently, I'm fairly sure the DG was in residence when Krugman wrote that the public debt was less important than people usually think because "it's basically money we owe ourselves."  I appreciate that the man won the Nobel Prize, but unless he means by "public debt" only that part of the national debt which the U.S. Treasury owes to the various trust funds (e.g., Social Security) which have been systematically looted in order to run the military industrial complex over the last 30 years or so, then his remark makes absolutely no sense.  At least 50% of the national debt is in the form of Treasury obligations (bills & bonds) of various maturities owed to private U.S. citizens and foreign citizens, banks and sovereign wealth funds.  It's just - well, stupid to say anything else.  And we're talking over $5 trillion, and of that amount over half is owed to foreigners.  That is not money "owed to ourselves;" it is very real debt, and the obligation exists against a backdrop of the Obama Administration's determination to invest in a recovery plan which will cost, initially, at least one trillion dollars.  And because of the many bailouts, TARP projects, promises to shore up the auto industry, etc., the deficit for fiscal year 2009 (which we're currently in) is clearly going to exceed a trillion dollars, by far the largest deficit (by a factor of two) in U.S. history, and almost all of that deficit is going to add to the real debt the country owes to real creditors.  The recovery plan of Obama's first year will clearly result in a deficit for fiscal 2010 at least as large, which means the nationald debt at the end of 2010 will exceed $12 trillion, pushing $13 trillion, and almost all of the new debt will take the "real" form as opposed to the DG's idealized notion of illusory debt.  Thus, we're looking at $8 trillion as the non-owed-to-ourselves part of the national debt, and that's difficult to laugh off the way Herr Krugman does.

I think the Doppelganger may have taken advantage of the twinned Christmas/Hanukkah week to push Paul out of his chair again today: 

Whatever the new administration does, we’re in for months, perhaps even a year, of economic hell. After that, things should get better, as President Obama’s stimulus plan — O.K., I’m told that the politically correct term is now “economic recovery plan” — begins to gain traction. Late next year the economy should begin to stabilize, and I’m fairly optimistic about 2010.

So my question for the Gheist is simply this: why?  What is the basis of the optimism?  Now, to begin with I do not want to stand in solidarity with such negativists as Jim Kunstler, the Clusterf**k Man (linked on this very page), who just never gives the American economy or its valiant people a break.  He's convinced that the generation currently in charge of the United States is simply incapable of any kind of rejuvenation, that we lack a real work ethic, that we're addicted to the Cosmic Free Lunch School of Economics, that we'd rather borrow than earn, that we haven't really done anything to ameliorate our situation or improve our modes of living (such as building a real railroad system or investing in sustainable farms) in generations, that we...okay, look.  Kunstler may not be totally wrong.  I note that yesterday Joe Biden, on "This Week," told cute little Georgie Stephanopolous (who does such an unconvincing job of playing a hard-hitting interrogator) that the economy could "tank" or "collapse" if we don't take drastic action, and that we just can't worry about deficits at this point.

I can see that it will do no good to worry about deficits.  It seems to me we're way past that point; indeed, we have crossed over into a new fiscal frontier, one where the Treasury Department is itself buying U.S. Treasuries to finance bailouts.  Now, perhaps I lack the sophistication of a Nobel Prize-winning economist, but isn't that more or less identical to covering a bad check at your bank by writing a check on the same account and depositing it?

"Legitimacy Dwindles."  That's the title on Clusterf**k's column today.  ("Dwindle" is one of only three common English words that begin with "dw," the other two being "dwarf" and "dwell."  See, Itz?  I read the emails, and Happy Festival of Lights.)  To lay my cards on the table, I really, really hope Krugman is right and Kunstler is wrong, and it's because, really, I think they're both partly spot on.  America is unique, which is why, so far, we've been allowed by the world at large to pretend we have the money which Biden talked about spending.  We don't actually have the money - not at all, not even close.  The problem is that the country which must use this unique resource, fake money, in order to revive the world's economies is the United States, and we are that collection of deadbeats, goof-offs, greed-heads, spoiled in-crowd kids sitting at the same table in the cafeteria, the one reserved for those who insist dining daily on the Cosmic Free Lunch.

Obama & Warren

Somewhat more than a year ago my cousin, oft-published writer, musician, philosopher, wit and alumnus of the same demented Fundie denomination that so scrambled my early cognitive development, had the idea that we should attend a "reunion" of the 17th Street congregation of this very church.  The 17th Street in question is on the western edge of the Mission District, not far east of Eureka Valley, and just a few blocks away from the heart of the Castro District, all of these locations in San Francisco.  Trusting my older cousin's judgment, and not wanting him to go through such an experience alone, I tagged along.  The congregation that used to meet at 17th Street now meets out at Lake Merced, along Brotherhood Way, in a soulless building, a giant A-frame, with an accompanying, depressing multi-purpose building. It was a foggy, cold day, which is to say: a day in San Francisco. The reunion started out with a Continental breakfast, a long table laden with the usual victuals typical of the denomination's Southern roots: ham, potato salad, fried chicken, strawberry cream pie.  Looking at this array, my cousin said, sotto voce, "What Continent?"  I told you he was a witty guy.

One of the "highlights" of the reunion was a visit to the old 17th Street building, which I remembered dimly from my 1950's youth.  The truth is, unlike my cousin, I never attended this church with any regularity.  I was down the Peninsula, but on occasion my mother would bring her sons up north for a special event, like the Sunday Pat Boone preached there.  What I remembered about the church was the semi-circular auditorium, with its great skylight in the ceiling, the balcony and the cold San Francisco wind forever blowing into the building.  

The building had changed hands.  It was now under the control of the Cornerstone Church, another Fundamentalist church which was to the Fundie church of my youth as National Socialism is to the politics of Nelson Rockefeller.  Our guide was a young fellow with a goatee and righteous attitude who displayed (subtle but nevertheless ill-disguised) contempt at the old congregants on the tour, at the pathetic size of the former 17th Street congregation (maybe 200 souls on a big Sunday), at the old-fashioned look of the joint when they first moved in, at how generally out of it those old alumnae now marooned out at Lake Merced really were.  The skylight had been removed and replaced with a hi-tech lighting array, which was much more conducive to the rock bands featured in the liturgy.  The guitars, drum sets, amps and mikes were all set up on the "stage" (what we might have called the dais back in the old days), in preparation for Sunday's gigs (the reunion was on a Saturday). On Sunday, our guide told us, they really packed 'em in, five or six separate shifts over the course of the morning, all SRO.  They recruited congregants from all over the Bay Area, but he was careful to tell us, turning to face West and pointing toward the Castro with both hands, that they did not recruit from the "gay community."  "We don't kowtow to the gays," he said proudly.  Because I am, in my own way, as much of a smart aleck as my cousin I couldn't stop myself from wondering in a stage whisper, "Who would Jesus kowtow to?"

As I've aged, I realize I've lost touch with a lot of things as they've developed, metastasized, degenerated, whatever you want to call these decadent changes in American society. One of those developments is the huge growth in the size and corporate structure of these Fundie religions, now mostly called Evangelical, I guess.  This thing at 17th Street was not the Old Time Religion of my youth.  If you look at Pastor Rick's website at Saddlebackfamily.com, you'll be astounded at the slick, corporate, PR-driven, New Age look of the place.  It's kind of Dr. Phil meets Elmer Gantry hitched to the Recovery Movement.  Twelve-Step flowing seamlessly into career advancement flowing into Group Identification flowing into complete and utter madness.  This Purpose Driven Life stuff that Warren is selling is snake oil and bullshit.  It has all the trappings of a cult, different from Jim Jones & the People's Temple in the sense that the Kool-Aid they're all drinking is the ambrosia of Warren's megalomania.  The Supreme Leader (the goateed and omentum-paunchy Pastor Rick), with his array of "degrees" from various undistinguished religious "colleges," the enmeshment in all kinds of "ministries," meetings, Singles Groups, Couples Groups, Campuses, onward ad absurdum ad nauseum--like all cults, it's all about a quality of total immersion in a group under the charismatic sway of a Personality of dubious provenance and highly-questionable motivations.

And of course: gays need not apply. The website specifically declares that gays cannot become members.  Never mind this latter-day qualifying and excuse-making about whether Pastor Rick is a homophobe.  You bet your sweet ass he is.  I'm a straight man myself, but I do bear in mind the old adage that it's best to defend the rights of the oppressed in order to ensure the rights of all. Otherwise, when the forces of dark intolerance come for you, there will be no one to champion your rights.  Warren is running the same kind of shop as that creep on 17th Street; it's just that Rick has gone very, very big-time with it. Rick Warren, son of a Baptist preacher in a congregation no doubt very much like the church of my youth, saw that in modern America, slick & corporate packaging sell.  Give the suckers what they want.  Give them quick and easy answers to life's eternal dilemmas (like EST once did), give them high-tech, give them one-stop shopping for all their Recovery Needs.  And give them Hate, some things and some people to be against.  Give all these desperate, yearning people the sense there are people they are better than.  Oldest demagogue's trick in the book.

And Barack fell for it.  He put a guy like that at the top of the playbill.  Sign of the times, I guess.  Well, the guy carries some clout, he's got Visibility, he's Hot, at least for a little while, and in this day and age, that's all that really matters.